“All this pomp for an opera!” it almost sounds as if Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) himself was displeased by the scale of the celebrations for his “Aida” on its world premiere in Cairo in 1871 – even though there were no elephants or mass marches as in the subsequent large-scale productions which mutated into Egyptian revues. For this, the Cairo Opera House with its seating capacity restricted to 850 was too small. But it did still profit from the attention surrounding the Suez Canal which had been opened 2 years before and attracted curiosity from around the world.

Verdi stayed away from the world premiere and concentrated on the Italian premiere at La Scala, Milan. Because, despite the Egyptian setting, despite the research which Verdi had undertaken, this piece like all the composer’s operas concentrated in its core on a human conflict. “Aida” consists of a love triangle, presented in psychologically illuminated scenes between the Egyptian King’s daughter Amneris and the Ethiopian slave Aida, accentuated by her father Amonasro and his patriotic intransigence, and directed towards the hero Radamès, who in the finale breathes away his last together with his “celeste Aida” as a fevered dream inside a walled-up prison. This is no party under the pyramids but a drama of human frailties which – as so often in Verdi – are subject to an unyielding apparatus of social and political power.

Director Philipp Himmelmann and stage designer Johannes Leiacker were already well-known to audiences before their famous “Tosca” in Bregenz. Their staging of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Berliner Staatsoper Unter den Linden was celebrated as a “highly emotional and stirring production” (klassik.com). The assured visual language and compelling direction of character which characterize the team’s work are reasons to believe that “Aida” too will be a thrilling evening’s opera.

***Giuseppe Verdi
AIDA

Opera in four acts
Libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni based on a scenario by Pascha François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette